1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to communications and in particular relates to communicating text files and associating sound files with the text files.
With the advance of electronic mail (e-mail), it has become common to transmit so-called emotional icons, otherwise known as emoticons, within messages. Such emoticons typically consist of one or more keyboard characters which can be understood to convey voice inflections, facial expressions, gestures, etc. For example, the ubiquitous “smiley face,” :-) is often transmitted to express happiness. As is well understood, this emoticon is constructed from a colon character, a dash character and a close parentheses character. There are a good number of such emoticons that can be constructed from ordinary keyboard characters.
2. Description of Related Art
U.S. Pat. No. 6,629,793 discloses an emoticon keyboard for generating emoticons and abbreviations with specialized keys. As is described in this patent, and as is well known generally, it is common for certain software application programs to translate the text emoticon into a graphical representation. For example, the ubiquitous :) is often depicted by software programs as an upright face with two eyes and a smiling mouth (a smiley face).
While it has been known in the art to convert textual emoticon symbols into graphic representations, it has heretofore not been known to also play any sort of audio in response to the particular emoticon being displayed or transmitted. Accordingly, the present invention is directed to a method for linking sounds and emoticons to allow a first user or sender to send an emoticon to a recipient or second user such that the recipient sees the emoticon and hears a sound associated with it.